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But what place is left for the particular souls, yours and
mine and another's?
May we suppose the Soul to be appropriated on the lower ranges to
some individual, but to belong on the higher to that other
sphere?
At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul
remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on
attainment of the highest.
Now nothing of Real Being is ever annulled.
In the Supreme, the Intellectual-Principles are not annulled, for
in their differentiation there is no bodily partition, no passing
of each separate phase into a distinct unity; every such phase
remains in full possession of that identical being. It is exactly
so with the souls.
By their succession they are linked to the several
Intellectual-Principles, for they are the expression, the Logos,
of the Intellectual-Principles, of which they are the unfolding;
brevity has opened out to multiplicity; by that point of their
being which least belongs to the partial order, they are attached
each to its own Intellectual original: they have already chosen
the way of division; but to the extreme they cannot go; thus they
keep, at once, identification and difference; each soul is
permanently a unity [a self] and yet all are, in their total, one
being.
Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source
of all; those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the
analogy of the Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and
undivided; that Soul which abides in the Supreme is the one
expression or Logos of the Intellectual-Principle, and from it
spring other Reason-Principles, partial but immaterial, exactly
as in the differentiation of the Supreme.
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